


Canyon

by stephanericher



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-11 20:22:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4450886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for a prompt on tumblr. Shuuzou and Tatsuya take a road trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Canyon

They’ve been on the road for maybe ten minutes when Shuuzou falls asleep, sights and sounds of the freeway familiar but oddly open and spacious with the conspicuous lack of traffic at four in the morning but still enough white noise and uneventful scenery to lull him back to sleep with the motions of the car, driven by Tatsuya’s steady hands. The radio is on in the background, dim English weather words that he manages to tune out because he’s too exhausted to think even in coherent Japanese, and Shuuzou is somewhat aware that it turns off at some point but by then he’s too far gone to do anything with the information and that’s the last he really remembers until he wakes up.

When he does, he’s greeted by blinding sun and shuts his eyes again, groaning. It smells like coffee; Tatsuya must have gotten some somewhere (although Shuuzou apparently slept through the car stopping and him getting out or the whole drive-through experience). The radio’s on again, a rap station playing softly enough in the background so that most of the vocals are lost but the beat comes through clear and steady; Shuuzou opens his eyes cautiously and shields them with his hand and Tatsuya’s tapping in time against the steering wheel.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” Tatsuya says.

And fuck, he looks cool, sunglasses on and rumpled clothes suiting him just fine; he looks no worse for the wear after a few hours of driving. Shuuzou’s sure he looks like a wreck (he sure as hell feels like one, and even if he looks only half as bad as he feels that’s still kind of shitty) but he didn’t go on this trip to look nice, and Tatsuya is Tatsuya so even at his worst he’s still going to be fucking gorgeous.

“Coffee?” says Tatsuya, gesturing with his elbow at the cup holders.

“Yes, please,” says Shuuzou.

It’s fast food coffee, but Shuuzou’s never been picky about that sort of thing; it’s still warm and definitely caffeinated so it’ll do just fine. There’s a sausage biscuit leftover in the bag, too; until he smells it Shuuzou has no idea how hungry he actually is.

“We in Arizona yet?”

Tatsuya shakes his head. “Nah. I wanted to go the long way, so we’ll go through Yuma.”

Shuuzou shrugs. “Okay by me.”

He finds a spare pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment when he’s digging through looking for napkins, and he closes his eyes and lets the sun hit his face. Tatsuya turns the radio up a little louder and it feels like they’re in some slow-moving coming-of-age flick, the kind Tatsuya makes him watch so he can improve his English but don’t make much sense to Shuuzou regardless of how well he learns the language. But now, coffee cup in hand and leaning back against the leather seat, he kind of starts to get it.

* * *

 

They get to the Grand Canyon the next afternoon, in time to walk through what seems like miles of dusty red heat and all around them looks as if it was just piled up flakes of rusty iron, even though the air is too dry for rust, drier even than it is back in Los Angeles, and the sand is too fine and the wrong texture and shine—under this light, with this winding path spread before the, it feels like it might be anything, as if there are so many possible explanations for this that all of them are true, that some ancient river that would have eroded these walls would rust them out, that once they’d been dark and silver-black, that the river could roar back through at any moment and they’d hear it coming because of how big and silent and almost magestic it is.

Even Tatsuya is speechless, lifting up his sunglasses to get a proper view, hand curled tightly around Shuuzou’s as they stand. The sunset is throwing shadows all over, peaks and towers of rocks like ruins of an ancient city, so wind-shaped they might have been statues once.

“They look kind of like they used to be sculptures,” Shuuzou says, pointing.

“They were,” says Tatsuya.

It’s a few seconds before Shuuzou gets it, pinching Tatsuya’s hip because it’s really not funny (no matter what kind of straight face he says it with), but they’re both immersed in the kind of silent giggles that are probably more appropriate for twelve-year-olds, still clutching each other’s hands and bodies eventually curling into each other, Tatsuya;s face buried in the crook of Shuuzou’s neck and by this point they’ve forgotten what was so funny in the first place.

They sleep in the campgrounds under the stars (and it gets cool in the wide expanse of the desert at night and both of them fit in the same sleeping bag); it’s not quite cozy but in the scheme of things it will definitely do (and being in his late twenties pressed up against his boyfriend with a thin layer between himself and the hard, uneven ground is still a far cry from being fourteen and alone in a huge apartment and tossing and turning in the loneliness). And this morning, Shuuzou’s the one who wakes up first and drives them off to get drive-through fast food (as it turns out, from the same regional chain because Arizona is basically the west coast without the ocean and that’s one of the too-many miscellaneous, almost entirely useless things Shuuzou’s learned about this country since he’s moved here).

* * *

 

They spend another day in Arizona, hiking in the mountains (and desert plants are beautiful and if it wasn’t even more impractical to live there than in Los Angeles Shuuzou might think twice about maybe staying) and then drive back to California, spending one last day driving aimlessly through suburbs and highways and small towns that all look the same before they finally drive back from their last capillary to the main artery of the interstate.

They only get stuck in serious traffic a few miles outside of the city; it’s much better than they could have hoped for and even so, it’s not all that bad. Shuuzou realizes that he’s smiling at all of it, at the drivers honking their horns and the stupid billboards advertising things he’ll never need, because it’s familiar and it’s okay and it’s starting to feel like home. And this trip has been fun and exhausting and illuminating and the bes thing about it has been having Tatsuya with him the whole time, Tatsuya being happy and excited about seeing these places with him, and that the place Shuuzou most wants to be at any given moment is with Tatsuya. Which he’d already known, but still—his hand finds Tatsuya’s on the area between their seats. The driver behind them honks, but the car in front hasn’t moved even an inch.

So Shuuzou leans over and kisses Tatsuya, sweet and slow like stretched taffy. Neither of them is paying much mind to the exaggerated commercials on the radio, only on each other and the road and getting home.


End file.
